A passage from Mr. Claude Guay’s letter published on July 17 makes me react: ” [La langue française] has been supplanted by written languages that are lighter to carry, easier to master and closer to spoken languages, closer finally to current knowledge and realities.
English does not owe its current predominance to its own qualities or to the supposed ease of its spelling. Indeed, the spelling of English, like that of French, is not “transparent”, that is to say, it does not correspond in all points to its pronunciation. If this were the key factor, a language like Spanish, very easy to write, would hold the upper hand. English owes its success to a conjuncture, as was the case for French before it and for Latin before that. What makes the success or misfortune of a language are the forces at play: geopolitical and economic above all, but also cultural.
If Serbo-Croatian were spoken in the United States, Serbo-Croatian would be the language that everyone would want to know how to speak today, not English. And students at the University of Sherbrooke who want to publish their thesis in a language other than French would insist on publishing it in Serbo-Croatian. Not because their thesis would be clearer or easier to write, but because it would have a better chance of being read by the greatest number of people.
In conclusion, the question is not whether we want to “save the French language and culture”: it is about who we are, our identity, our way of seeing the world. We should rather ask ourselves whether or not our way of seeing the world deserves to exist.
As for French spelling, it is the result of centuries of evolution and influences. Few languages in the world carry such an imposing baggage. Lightening it a little would certainly not hurt, but let us not believe that the fate of languages is due to a few spelling difficulties more or less.